On Fri, 28 Feb 2020 at 17:49, Rainer Deyke via Boost
In my example, I don't know or care which how the encrypted zip files were generated. Could be WinZip or PKZip, both of which are closed source.
Yes, a good way to decrypt it is then to use PkZip. You do realize that PKZip has supported encrypted (aka
password-protected) zip files since 1993, right?
That's just slightly before the rest of the world stopped using it (like much better things like .arc, .lh, .arj etc etc, compression was a big thing in the 80's and 90's for obvious reasons). Do you really think Boost has to cater for this kind of situations (some nut-case with a pkzip file. I would do a one time unzip with pkzip, and re-zip with lzma or something of that kind), while earlier today, the suggestion of having a signed size_type is readily rejected. I doubt there are many even bigger nut-cases that still keep generating pkzip-archies in 2020)? Normally these are one-time problems, which need a quick simple (possibly inefficient) one-time solution (creating some shell command to unzip (and re-zip) a list of file with pkzip, or something of the kind). Time is money, no matter what you take to write in C++, it will need debugging (could be long, old file-formats, you are now trying to find the bugs in a 27-year old application, I'm sure the boss will think that was time well spent). In a previous life, I was an FD (CFO) of a business unit in a multinational, and I have managed 2 big implementation of SAP/R3. In Europe I was getting results much faster than my counter-parts in the other countries of the EU, by just hiring some temps (cheap, as many as you like to have at one time) to do the keying (of old data) and make the book-keepers do the checking of the input. It saved mega on consultancy fees (at the time about EUR4K/day, vs E10/day for the temp) and got the job done, it's not beautiful and everybody moaned when I decided that, but two weeks later we had happy faces all over the place. The pkzip-situation is similar. degski -- @realdegski https://brave.com/google-gdpr-workaround/ "We value your privacy, click here!" Sod off! - degski "Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist" - Kenneth E. Boulding "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" - Edward P. Abbey